Guest: Richard Grusin, Arboreal Imaginings: Trees, Technics, Mediation

Abstract

In the late 1990s, the heyday of internet enthusiasm in the west, the concept of a "wood-wide web" was coined by botanists and other natural scientists, based upon research showing that trees communicated with mycorrhizal fungi through networks that were analogized to the World-Wide Web. Such arboreal imaginings have multiplied over the past three decades, not only in the natural sciences but in the popular imaginings of art, literature, and film. In this lecture I will explore this fruitful analogy between natural and technical networks, neither to embrace them nor to dismiss them. Rather I will complicate this sometimes too-easy analogy in an attempt to demonstrate the ways in which technical, arboreal, and mycorrhizal networks are linked by their participation in what I have elsewhere called "radical mediation."

Bio

Grusin is a Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, and former Director of the Center for 21st Century Studies. He is an American new media scholar and author of significant works like Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11(2010) and has co-authored the groundbreaking work Remediation: Understanding New Media (1999) with Jay David Bolter.

How to participate

It is possible to attend the seminar both from Dacke in Växjö and via zoom. Contact us at ims@lnu.se if you want to participate via zoom.

Photo: 'Aurora - Connecting Senses’, Cristina Pop-Tiron & Signe Kjær Jensen